supremacy in the ten states in order to gain to itself the representation of those states in Congress, it had to begin by governing the people of those states by the sword....  The next was the creation of new electoral bodies for those ten states, in which, by exclusions, by disfranchisements and proscriptions, by control over registration, by applying test oaths ... by intimidation and by every form of influence, three million negroes are made to predominate over four and a half million whites.”

=The War as a Campaign Issue.=—­Even the repeal of force bills could not allay the sectional feelings engendered by the war.  The Republicans could not forgive the men who had so recently been in arms against the union and insisted on calling them “traitors” and “rebels.”  The Southerners, smarting under the reconstruction acts, could regard the Republicans only as political oppressors.  The passions of the war had been too strong; the distress too deep to be soon forgotten.  The generation that went through it all remembered it all.  For twenty years, the Republicans, in their speeches and platforms, made “a straight appeal to the patriotism of the Northern voters.”  They maintained that their party, which had saved the union and emancipated the slaves, was alone worthy of protecting the union and uplifting the freedmen.

Though the Democrats, especially in the North, resented this policy and dubbed it with the expressive but inelegant phrase, “waving the bloody shirt,” the Republicans refused to surrender a slogan which made such a ready popular appeal.  As late as 1884, a leader expressed the hope that they might “wring one more President from the bloody shirt.”  They refused to let the country forget that the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, had escaped military service by hiring a substitute; and they made political capital out of the fact that he had “insulted the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic” by going fishing on Decoration Day.

=Three Republican Presidents.=—­Fortified by all these elements of strength, the Republicans held the presidency from 1869 to 1885.  The three Presidents elected in this period, Grant, Hayes, and Garfield, had certain striking characteristics in common.  They were all of origin humble enough to please the most exacting Jacksonian Democrat.  They had been generals in the union army.  Grant, next to Lincoln, was regarded as the savior of the Constitution.  Hayes and Garfield, though lesser lights in the military firmament, had honorable records duly appreciated by veterans of the war, now thoroughly organized into the Grand Army of the Republic.  It is true that Grant was not a politician and had never voted the Republican ticket; but this was readily overlooked.  Hayes and Garfield on the other hand were loyal party men.  The former had served in Congress and for three terms as governor of his state.  The latter had long been a member of the House of Representatives and was Senator-elect when he received the nomination for President.